When someone says they have a reptile or reptiles as pets, your first response is either “Yuck, gross” or possibly “Cool!” Reptiles continue to be one of the fastest growing segments of the pet market even with the most recent additions to the re-stricted list. You may be one of those people who wandered into the store for a bag of dog food and left with a snake and a $300.00 setup. More than 2 millions reptiles are imported into the US each year although that number is rapidly dropping, not because of lack of interest but because of captive breeding which has exploded over the past 10 years. With captive breeding comes the hybrids created from selective breeding of species. Who ever thought there would be more than 25 color variations of the most common lizard kept as a pet, the Leopard Gecko and almost 100 varia-tions of the common Ball Python.
